The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  It was obvious to me, as I would suppose it must be to anyone, that the body is not a machine, varying only as the Ford varies from the Rolls-Royce—in quality. I have lived to see the day when worn-out organs can be replaced from another body, a form of cannibalism which sometimes works. This is a triumph of the mechanical theory of medicine. But very few people come to the point where they have to go to the body-shop for a new part.

  I believe, as I discovered Paracelsus had believed before me, that there are as many stomachs, hearts, livers and lights as there are members of the human race, and that they should be treated individually to suit their special needs, whatever these might be. And those needs are not always to be found in the laboratory, but in the lay-confessional of the physician’s consulting-room. Treatment must be intensely personal, and if sometimes it strays into the realm of mind, there the physician must follow it. But usually it is in that realm where mind and body mingle—where the mind affects the body and the body the mind, and where untangling the relationship is the Devil’s own work, and takes time and application and sympathy—that the hard-driven general practitioner and his specialist brother cannot be expected to provide for every patient who knocks on his door.

  I suppose if I were driven to describe my method of work I would call it a type of psychosomatic medicine by which I attempt to bring about change in the disease syndromes through language, and therefore through reason. And sometimes (and this was where the canker gnawed for my ultra-reasonable colleagues) in that fibrous darkness below reason. The change might never be complete, but the patient would feel much better because he—perhaps more often, she—had learned to approach the individual quality of life and the body through which life was experienced, in a different way.

  No, no, not psychoanalysis! That marvellous but extremely limited adventure in human understanding behaves as if its patients lived principally in the mind, and as if the patients’ coughs and colds and indigestions, arthritis, “bad lower back,” tricky heart, asthma, skin ailments, and all the rest of their disquiets were creatures of another realm, to be dealt with by somebody else.

  “Back to Paracelsus!” was McWearie’s cry when I first spoke of this concept to him. But no, not to Paracelsus alone, but to other great ones, of whom Robert Burton, who wrote his Anatomy of Melancholy to treat his own melancholy, must be a distinguished partaker. In my work on Ward J I had discovered that a new or merely an altered way of thinking was curative. It would not restore an amputated leg, or bring back an errant girlfriend, but it would give a new look at those misfortunes and the new look was healing.

  I have been known to recommend another look at religion as a way to better health, or perhaps I should say well-being. For what is health?

  I say (and of late years I am astonished that the World Health Organization agrees with me) that health is when nothing hurts very much; but the popular idea is of health as a norm to which we must all seek to conform. Not to be healthy, not to be in “top form” is one of the few sins that modern society is willing to recognize and condemn. But are there not as many healths as there are bodies? If whatever we are demands certain physical frailties, why struggle to get rid of them? And what have the exemplars of health, our cherished and greatly rewarded athletes, ever done for mankind? They are entertainers, of a lesser sort. If McWearie’s contribution to the public good, and his own deepest satisfaction, demands booze and stink, why try to turn him into a discontented ghost of himself, and kill him with what is popularly supposed to be kindness.

  So I approach my patients intuitively, with my antennae trembling at every hint from body or speech, and when I have found out whatever I can, I do whatever seems to me to be best.

  Severe disease, of course—identifiable, virulent and demanding disease—yields to rapid diagnosis, and sometimes cures or simply palliatives are available. The vis medicatrix naturae—Nature’s healing power—is the physician’s great ally with these, but every now and then he can snatch someone from the grave, and deserves every credit for doing so. But such dramatic diseases are a small part of what the doctor is expected to treat.

  To practise this sort of medicine I did not want to be in one of the big buildings of medical offices; I needed space and privacy, and thus it was that I ended up in the stables at Glebe House.

  It was McWearie who suggested it. “The place has just the unlikely appearance that would suit you,” said he. “Over the principal entrance, which is wide enough for a Victorian carriage with a top-hatted coachman on the box, is a fine carved representation of three splendid horses, apparently in conversation. The inside finish is handsome, and upstairs is the coachman’s apartment and room for a couple of grooms. It will take a lot of adapting and doing over, but it will give you premises wholly unlike anything any physician has ever had anywhere at any time. You’ll have to brave The Ladies but they can’t eat you and I know they need money. Go in and win.”

  So it happened, though I do not remember it quite as it appears in Chips’ letter to her friend Barbara Hepworth, whom I presume she had known in student days in England. There are more such letters.

  How did they come my way? Because in the course of time I became quite an intimate of The Ladies—or as intimate as anybody ever got with them. I was a model tenant and I must say that as time wore on they were the most kindly and generous of landladies. Chips was wrong; neither of us repented our bargain. I saw one of them into the grave and the other leave Glebe House, and in the end it was I, the horse with the secret sorrow, who acted as the executor for Pansy Freake Todhunter.

  When, of necessity, I went through her desk, I found these letters neatly bundled up, with a letter from Dame Barbara’s solicitor, dated 1975, saying that as Miss Hepworth had kept them it seemed proper that they should be returned to the writer. Thus it was that I came upon a strongly slanted account of much that I remembered, and a view of myself which sometimes astonished and sometimes dismayed me.

  But the letters! I have never seen such letters, and I could readily understand why they had been so carefully preserved. Not for Chips’ literary style, God knows, which was in the schoolgirl-slangy vein of her speech. No: for their extraordinary beauty.

  Miss Pansy Freake Todhunter was an etcher, and in that genre her work was fine, though no more thrilling—to me at least—than etchings usually are. But these letters, which were written in a minute Italic hand, in the blackest ink on Mr. Russell’s beautiful buff paper, were ornamented by lovely little vignettes (so tiny in some cases that one almost needed a magnifying glass to appreciate them) that seemed to have been done with a mapping pen. And they were in a style that had nothing of the sobriety that marked Chips’ serious work; they were brilliant little caricatures, reminiscent in style of some of the best Punch artists—Tenniel, DuMaurier, and the wonderfully funny F. H. Townshend—and they gave the letters a brilliance, a beauty, a quality of delightful hilarity that lifted Chips’ awful prose to a much higher level. There was I—yes, I must face it, a horse with a secret sorrow. There were scraps and bits of Glebe House, affectionate yet mocking in their evocation of Augustus Welby Pugin’s Gothic romanticism. Of course the recipient had kept them. To have destroyed one of them would have been an act of vandalism.

  I cherish them yet and look at them now and then when the past recurs to me in too dark shades.

  VIGNETTES

  (In Chips’ First Letter)

  1. A sketch of the lofty old conservatory, seen from outside.

  2. Glebe House, which Chips has given quite a Dickensian air, though to me it looked like a house that could only have been built in Canada by a homesick Englishman.

  3. Me—the horse with the secret sorrow. Clever, perceptive, uncharitable woman!

  4. But she is as hard—and as just—to herself as to me, and here she is; a Freake indeed.

  5. A Freake face, lusting for letters.

  (3)

  Glebe House.

  Cockcroft Street

  Toronto, Ontario


  Canada

  Dear Old Thing:

  Overjoyed (has anybody ever been underjoyed, I wonder?) to have better news of you and quite understand long silence. There are times when one simply can’t write, and I know how agonizing the whole thing must have been, when Ben is such a dear, and there were the kidlets to consider (though they must be—what?—late teens by now?) But what good news that you are still friends and that you have his encouragement and advice when you want it. Terrific about Venice! But the way of the sculptor is hard, isn’t it? Dear One is still bashing her head against brick walls in this artistically God-forsaken country where their idea of a statue is something like Winston Churchill in bronze with a cigar that really smokes sticking out of his mouth!1 Still, odds and bits do come in, and there are one or two enlightened souls who buy some of her small stuff, and the universal and abstract vision of beauty you used to talk about is not dead in her. Though she does get pulled down, poor sweet!

  Artistically God-forsaken—I’m not sure how fair that is, but damn it, the growth of any sort of art in a new country—once colony, now independent but not really firm on its legs yet—is so wobbly and slow. They have some good politicians here—sharp as razors, and Mackenzie King (Prime Minister, just dead if you don’t know) was an old fox who could give Disraeli lessons, but his notions about art were primitive and he thought If Winter Comes the greatest novel ever written.2 But apart from politics and business and sport nothing is very much valued here. The letter you quote from Kit Jones, saying that her husband, the mighty psychoanalyst, called Canadians “a despicable race, exceedingly bourgeois, quite uncultured, very rude and very narrow and pious,” has to be balanced against his own experience here just before World War One (as the papers now call it) when he offended Toronto morality by living openly with Loe. (Remember Loe? What can it have been?)3 Of course that sort of thing is not unknown here but Ernest hadn’t the decency to conceal it, as Canadians do, and he seemed almost to be doing it on principle. No proper sense of sin, which Canadians like. I gather that is why they gave him the heave-ho, which was probably the best thing for him anyhow as he seems to have made a big Harley Street name, and is the St. Peter to Sigmund Freud’s Christ, even if he isn’t quite the Beloved Disciple.4 Canada isn’t nearly as bad as Ernest says; just about thirty years behind the times artistically and what he says about being bourgeois and uncultured and narrow and pious could just as well be said about Nottingham or any of a dozen places we know and keep away from.—Anyway, the going for a sculptor is rough. I get rid of a few etchings from time to time but they don’t fetch much. But they probably wouldn’t at home, either. I’m not really a big talent, and they think $50. is the earth for an etching.

  Yes, it has all worked out splendidly about the doctor and the stables. We spy on him quite a lot and I’ll give you the lowdown later.

  But at present we are up to our necks in the nearby church, on the glebe of which this house stands. Yes, my dear, we have become quite church-mice not because we have got softening of the brain or anything but because the clergy are so fascinating!

  St. Aidan’s is terribly High, and has really wonderful music and DeCourcy Parry, who directs it, is a composer of stature. We haven’t seen much of him yet, but we have hopes. His right-hand man and leader of his Chancel Choir (plainchant, and not far off Solesmes, if you can believe it) is one Darcy Dwyer5 who has become a great chum and is gradually bringing people to this house who are the best company we have found since stepping off the boat. But the big noise at St. Aidan’s is a very modest noise indeed, called Father Ninian Hobbes and he is really an old dear and pooh-poohs any suggestion that he is anything out of the ordinary. I would call him a saint if it were not for a reason I’ll explain later. But Père Hobbes gives away everything he has to the poor—really fetches it up out of his pocket where he carries it in an old-fashioned leather bag. If he hasn’t anything, he turns the bag inside out and blesses the beggar with a smile that is as beautiful as anything you have ever seen. Not that he is a beauty.6 False teeth of the very falsest kind, a backward-looking chin and I think he cuts his own hair. He is shy of women, and we have had to coax him with food which he gives at once to his beggars. He calls them God’s People—absolutely Tolstoyan! In winter he roams the back alleys around here where the down-and-outs sleep; I think he knows every refuge of the really bad kind for a mile in every direction, and he prowls the night with a flashlight, and when he finds somebody sleeping huddled up in the cold he brings him back to the Rectory and settles him down near the stove. I say “him” but he has a great following of old women, many of them manifestly mad.

  His right-hand man—a curate I suppose but not a bit the limp piece of spaghetti that word suggests—is Father Iredale—Charlie to us, now. He is as feet-on-the-ground as Father Hobbes is head-in-the-air, manages everything, directs the ritual with the eye of a Reinhardt and doesn’t let Father Hobbes be imposed on more than is decent for a saint. Because Charlie is determined Father Hobbes is a saint and I think he expects a miracle at any time. He is absolutely sweet to the old man and we admire him for it and send decent food over to the Rectory as often as we can at times when Charlie can get it on the table before Father Hobbes calls in the poor and needy, who are never full up. Oh Barbara, how I now understand Christ’s words that ye have the poor always with you! And what bores they are, poor loves!

  The other curate is Father Whimble, a decent, quiet, rather stupid dutiful man who does what Charlie tells him, and also worships Father Hobbes.

  Charlie knows our new tenant who has, after rather more than two years of fastidious tinkering with our stables, got them to his liking and moved in. Charlie knows Dr. Hullah, but I thought his jaw dropped a bit when we told him Hullah had taken the old building.

  But about us and the church. We go. We can’t know Charlie and do what we can about Father Hobbes without going. It’d be like knowing an author and not at least buying his books, however much you hated them. But while I maintain a good deal of my original scorn for the Church and all its works—result of having been to a first-rate Anglican school—Dear One is becoming more and more involved. Not in church works, exactly (I don’t think the ladies of the church would welcome us with open arms, for they mistrust English people—probably with good reason) but in actual attendance at services, and I tag along pretty often. The music is splendid, of course, and I’d have been a musician if I had had any talent, but D.O. goes to services where there is no music, and there is a look on her dear face that I cannot very well describe—an open, fulfilled, beautiful look that moves me to tears.7 But when we come back for breakfast she is just as much her old, witty, un-churchy self as ever.

  Charlie adores her. In a priestly way, of course. He has a sharp wit, and so has she, and their conversation is marvellous. She says very sharp things, as she always has, and he pretends to be shocked or outraged and rebukes her in mock priestly terms which really egg her on to greater flights. They end up laughing their heads off, and it sets me up no end to see Dear One so happy, and with somebody of her own quality. She is always urging him to get married, and be explains in hilarious terms why it would never work—unless she, the beautiful sculptress Emily Raven-Hart, would consent to be his bride. This is a great joke, of course, for although nothing is ever said I am sure he understands the situation at Glebe House perfectly.

  “Ain’t I volatile?” like Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield. And here’s the end of this sheet and that must be all for now, but I shall write again after a bit.

  Greatest love from us both,

  CHIPS

  VIGNETTES

  1. A hideous realization of such a statue, the cigar the size of a baseball bat.

  2. Mr. King, a wisp of hair hanging over his clever face, but, alas, his mouth, as usual, is open.

  3. Loe—not a face to launch a thousand ships.

  4. Ernest Jones, cocking an eye upward toward his halo, which is guttering badly.

  5. Darcy to the life, with a Meph
istophelean air he would have loved.

  6. Poor Fr. Hobbes: why does God make so many of his most devoted servants so damnably ugly?

  7. Emily Raven-Hart, seen through the eyes of her lover.

  (4)

  Chips is right; Charlie is not best pleased that I have moved into the ambience of St. Aidan’s. I suppose he wants to be free of youthful associations, as most of us do. From the frail, dreamy youth who showed such extraordinary guts when he had his fenestration operation, he has become an extremely competent, managerial sort of holy man with a talent for the ceremonial aspect of his services. He always loved that sort of thing and I remember the glee with which he described how, in some churches in the Age of Faith, a beadle with a sword stood near the altar at Communion, ready to stab any dog or cat who might wander in and gobble up a fallen crumb of the Holy Bread. Our Lord’s body passing through the guts of a mongrel! The thought filled him with a delicious terror. He seems to have outgrown such Gothic tomfoolery but the services at St. Aidan’s are pretty fancy. When we meet he is civil but always too busy to stop and chat, and he sweeps away in his cassock and the becoming (he knows how becoming) flat cap he wears with it—a thing like a scholar’s mortar-board with the cardboard taken out. All the clergy at St. Aidan’s wear their cassocks all the time; it is against custom and I don’t suppose the Bishop likes it, but he rules with a light hand.

  I see more of Charlie than he sees of me, for I am now thoroughly dug in at my stable clinic, and from my private hideout and post of observation in the tower—yes, there is even a neat little tower on this archidiaconal horse-palace, to echo the larger tower of the same design on Glebe House—I see him swanning around looking at once medieval and thoroughly of the moment, a priest among his people. I also see The Ladies as they come and go, and Chips grubbing endlessly in the excellent flower and vegetable garden she has made, pausing from time to time to nag the simpleton who cuts the grass and pulls weeds (and often flowers) in the gardener’s never-ending fight with the chaos of Nature. So they spied on me quite a lot, did they? I spied on them, probably just as much.